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Wake Up, This Is Joburg

Wake Up, This Is Joburg

$28.95

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$28.95

SKU: 9781478018704 Category:
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A single image taken from a high-rise building in inner-city Johannesburg uncovers layers of history—from its premise and promise of gold to its current improvisations. It reveals the city as carcass and as crucible, where informal agents and processes spearhead its rapid reshaping and transformation. In Wake Up, This Is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of some of the city’s ordinary, odd, and outrageous residents. Their photos and essays take readers into meat markets where butchers chop cow heads; the eclectic home of an outsider artist that features turrets and full of manikins; long-abandoned gold pits beneath the city, where people continue to mine informally; and lively markets, taxi depots, and residential high-rises. Sharing people’s private and work lives and the extraordinary spaces of the metropolis, Zack and Lewis show that Johannesburg’s urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, wide-scale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals. Writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of its residents, showing how its urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, widescale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals. Tanya Zack is an urban planner, writer, and Visiting Researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Mark Lewis is a photographer who lives in Johannesburg. Foreword. True Places / Achal Prabhala  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction  1
1. S’kop  27
2. Tony Dreams in Yellow and Blue  53
3. Inside Out  81
4. Zola  115
5. Good Riddance  143
6. Tea at Anstey’s  175
7. Bedroom  211
8. Master Mansions  241
9. Johannesburg. Made in China  271
10. Undercity  305
References  337
Index  339

“Wake Up, This is Joburg is a fantastic, creative work that offers a broad look at one of Africa’s most vibrant and intriguing cities. By digging down into a range of compelling stories, Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack give their readers a rich and textured entrée into the inventiveness, precarity, and contingency that shape the lived experiences of Johannesburg’s residents. Illuminating parts of the city that readers may know little or nothing about, this book is a beautifully executed, smart, and elegant contribution.”
“Johannesburg’s inner city can seem like a malevolent playground with its equipment scattered across broken fields, but it is still a place for life to reinvent itself. Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis give us stories and images of individuals residing in neighborhoods heading in all directions at once, places where everything is up for grabs. As such, these stories are replete with wild mixtures of various feelings and astute intelligence, reminding us how little we know about the cities where we live.”
"These pieces are sometimes sad, sometimes inspiring, and add up to a complicated picture of a city of contradictions. . . . Wake Up, This Is Joburg tells its range of interesting stories well, through on-the-ground reporting, with ample interviews and context, letting a variety of people around Johannesburg talk about both the struggles and successes of everyday life in the inner city."
 

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in